Corporate governance is the set of processes, customs, policies, laws, and institutions affecting the way a corporation (or company) is directed, administered or controlled. Defined as "specifying the accountability and decision rights framework"

Do we really need governance?

Governance will remain a difficult issue for today’s business, digitalized organizations with extended business boundary at an increasingly flat world, and the desire for more innovation will make governance issues more complex. Without it, the law of entropy takes over and any orderliness disappears.

The Great Recession we've just been through even makes us think deeper about how to enhance governance.

Enables realization of the EA future state by ensuring project alignment tailored for the organization.

Management, assurance and compliance processes

Audit, legal and regulatory term

What are biggest problems for today’s Governance?

Business and IT often perceive governance as an impediment to innovation, is today’s governance over-control, not resilient enough to embrace the change?

One point of struggles is governance taking away liberties that are essential to people doing their jobs at creative way, if there's a problem with trust then governance will suffer, because motivations are not aligned across organizational boundaries.

Culture resistance to governance from project-focused staff who argue that governance hinders agility. But this argument confuses project-level freedom with organizational agility. True enterprise-level agility requires the architectural coherency that comes with an business vision realized through conscientious governance.

Why do we need agile governance?

Today’s rapidly changing business environment shorten the average fortune 500 companies’ life span from 75 years to less than 15 years, only the most agile enterprise will survive and thrive, beyond Agile Wings we discussed earlier, the problem is not about weather we need governance , more about applying the right kind of governance according to context.

It's not 'one style fits all': we need very different styles of governance depending on where the piece of work sits on a spectrum from classic Hierarchy “Waterfall” (Control -governance) to a Self-management 'Agile' (loose-governance)

Define the spectrum of governance from waterfall-control to free-form agile, and the conditions that apply to change-projects and experiments at each point along that spectrum. In other words, define a flexible form of governance across the change-space, in which, for example, ‘Shadow IT’ Migrate from IT governance to business change governance would be explicitly encouraged as long as it’s outside of clearly-defined boundaries. Provide support to enable agile projects to identify non-negotiable constraints such as regulation or mandatory standards.

Here are seven questions to ask in order for organizations to manage governance:

Can the work of managing be pushed out to the periphery of our organizations?

Can it be automated? Can it be dispensed with entirely?

Is it possible for an organization to be highly decentralized and precisely synchronized?

Can you get discipline without disciplinarians?

Are there ways of combining the freedom and flexibility advantages of self-management with the control and coordination advantages of traditional hierarchies?

Can we reduce the performance drag of our top-heavy management structures without giving anything up in terms of focus and efficiency?

To what extent can "self-management" or "peer-management" substitute for manager-management?

What are the Agile Governance Best Practices?

Led from the top, define architecture standards, establish a rigorous and stable governance process

Appoint people with the right skills for the lead roles.

The shift of governance to focus on enterprise change

No Single EA Governance Definition Fits All Cases

Include More Agility In Your EA Governance Processes

From mechanistic governance to Agile governance

Embedded Governance in the business strategy and IT planning cycle.

Embedded Governance in the investment decision cycle for IT and business.

Shift the governance conversation from availability of IT resources to the most productive uses for the enterprise's scarce resources

Think of Governance as a Process, Not a Committee

Avoid Defining Governance in Terms of Technologies

Blended Combination of governance styles depends on the decision being made

Sky is like the infinite canvas, sometimes, cloud flow and print the art on it, now cloud computing also shape the business society, make a big impact on the new realm of digitization.

Cloud is growing bigger, according to the reputable consulting company’s report, 81% of businesses are either planning, in early or advanced stages of experimentation or already have full-on cloud implementations. Cloud is the timely transformative technology which helps businesses become more agile, improve processes, and deliver the cost-effectiveness.

Don’t let Cloud pass you by, when we watch the cloud in the sky, we have some expectation, the wind, the rain, the snow, the iceberg, same as cloud computing, it will bring some strategic nature wins:

1. Agile Winds

As lightly cloudy Summer sky brings up the breeze to soothe our feelings and lift up our spirit, the cloud computing will blow the agile winds to reshape the organization with flexibility and scalability, easy to provision, faster to market, cloud is not only the application delivery platform on the fly, but also the efficient mechanism for creating the instant on infrastructure. Cloud adoption is quickly shifting from a competitive advantage to an operational necessity.

Cloud also transforms the CapEx to OpEx, it provides business no matter big or small the new flexibility to take advantage of the latest technology, to build up the competent capacity with elasticity and agility.

2. Green Rains

Like Spring rain to nurture the land and sprout the green, the cloud computing, based on virtualization, brings up the energy efficiency, improve the hardware utilization, network reliability, and reduce the carbon footprint, cloud becomes the sustainable technology not only improve business’s bottom line, but also turns green to be the new gold.

The natural economies of cloud enforce utilization and smoothing of inevitable workload peaks and troughs, do improve the greater energy efficiency, cloud is also the new solution to help re-designing the data center, and re-imagine the IT, for the long run, the virtualization and cloud computing do inspire the new hardware design with energy efficiency, increase flexibility, responsibility and manageability, to help build up the more sustainable, also more cost-effective business and to framework the wired enterprise without wire.

3 Brain Storms

As nature storms influence the productivity and our daily life, the cloud-based social computing create brainstorms to make impact on culture and human society.

Like cloud blurs the sky, cloud computings blurs the industrial boundaries and geographic boundaries as well. The infusion of social software capabilities through the enterprise provides the powerful platform to engage employees, connect with partners and customers, to co-create the knowledge stream, to share the thoughts and wisdoms, to wash out the negative rules, to extend information value chain, to amplify the customers’ voice and to inter-connect the better world.

4. Big Data Shower

Like the nature cloud full of water will pour out the shower upon the earth, the online conversations and applications create exponential data and information which we call the Big Data, the cloud saturated with Big data may also deliver the big data shower, means both opportunities and risks, the opportunity means radical customization, the constant experimentation, and new business model creation, but security and compliance are the potential pitfalls we also need well prepare for.

Like the nature power of shower, big data shower also has big volume, velocity and viability, the organization need capture and analyze big data, because the traditional monolithic data warehouse is no longer efficient enough to bring up the business insight, even the hindsight is not valid enough, since in today’s rapidly changing environment, history may not repeat itself so often, and only the real time big data can shape our vision and gain foresight for what we should do next,

5. Innovation Flakes

Like snow flakes whitening the earth, innovation flakes brighten the world, and cloud computing may become the dynamic incubator to turn routine businesses into innovation magic house, because it now takes only fraction of time and cost to try and fail with new ideas, the failure is no longer the fatal pain, it becomes an option for business to learn, grow, try and improve.

For forward-looking business, cloud computing also provides effective platform for open innovation in business design, strategy and marketing experiment, customer communication and talent management, the proven innovation then replicate and scale up to benefit larger base of users with speed.

6. Creative Destruction Thunders & Lightening

Like nature thunders and lightening to warn the coming storms, the Cloud computing also signal the age of radical digitization: more creative destructions are on the way to re-imagine IT, business and our personal life, such as E-Book destruct the traditional paper book business, smart phone and mobile computing is destructing the pc, and cloud is destructing the legacy business/IT infrastructure and service.

More radically, Cloud destructs the old way to do the things, inspire the fresh thinking and new communication style, destructs the silo functions, and integrate the business processes into more holistic business management seamlessly.

7. ICE (Intelligent Consumer Electronic) Bergs

Cloud with the chance of iceberg! The Consumerization of IT, which means many smart personal computing devices such as smart phone, tablet, netbook, e-reader., etc, connected into the cloud, and ascendance of mobile becomes the dominant cloud platform for human interactions both within enterprise and with customers, partners and personal life.

The convergence of smart device with Cloud has transformed our society into the more radical digital age, the whole world get more inter-connected via the Cloud.

Not all Clouds are created equal, pay more attention to the dark cloud on the silver lining, the pitfalls when you jump in, but also, don’t just watch over the cloud and forget to reap the harvest.

We’ve been living in such a dynamic world, Change is the only constant, actually even change itself has been changed and expedite, the world is transforming from personal computing into digital computing, from globalization into globality, from knowledge limitationto information explosion, the answer about yesterday is not as critical as the questions about the future.

How to ask the right questions is not only just the raw intelligence to reflect human’s curiosity, it becomes the new skills need be sharpened and focused on, to co-solve the common problems and co-create the better world.

One of the discussions about how to ask the questions at HBR forum attracts 500+ comments may reflect the new normal: to stay hungry and foolish, to challenge the outdated rules or culture, to perceive the invisible and spark the collective wisdom and new thinking.

1. The Art of Questions

Like a piece of art, the great question is beautiful and insightful, to spark imagination, connect the dots with our own personal experience and appreciation, make us feel engaged in the exchange.

The art of question is to ignite innovative thinking, the essential to questioning also stimulates the creative sides of our brains in order to find answers.

A great leader is one who has all the questions but not all the answers:

How to see the things as a whole, from management perspective, it’s to see through the spirit of organization, it’s to ask the open ended questions about the structure, the process, and the culture,it inspires the fresh thinking about the legacy issues, the new angles to see the unsolved problems.

Albert Einstein’s quote: “We can’t solve the problem with the same thinking we used when we created them”.

The art of question is also much more about the communication, we all desire to seek and participate conversations, it’s the part of human nature, and the whole world can engage in a big conversation to change for the better through social networking.

2. The Science of Questions

The effective questioning is also about the science, it’s tough and direct, need the critical thinking, the logic and the reasoning. Direct questions are not necessarily meant to offend.Through the science of questions, such as 5 Ws and 1H: What and Why and When, And How and Where and Who, we search the patterns, get quantified answers and qualified information, to help us make the wise decisions and plan the better scenario.

The science of questioning is about asking the right question at the right time to the right person for the right information, it is also based on the art of listening, it’s the attitude, the trust, it’s the soft science of communication embedded with hard science of problem solving capability, the robust questions in a way that helped us "dispassionately" examine alternatives, it’s synthetic process to stimulate the whole brain thinking.

The science of questions is also about fact finding, the analysis, the structured thinking, the objective evaluation and comparison, the progressive pursuit of better solutions, it’s human’s cognitive improvement.

3.The Philosophy of Questions

Assume nothing, Question Everything, there is no such thing as a stupid question. All top philosophers will tell you this:

·Socrates (Socratic Method) a series of questions that are asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand.Socratic dialogue that helps people reach their own conclusions about what can be done to improve a plan or project, which of course leads to much more ownership and learning.

·"The three peers, which must have my teacher and I chose him in good to learn from him”--ConfuciusThe questioning culture will cultivate the learning attitude, step out of our comfort zone and become the life-time learner.

·“We can’t solve the problem with the same thinking we used when we created them”. Albert Einstein

· “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” –Shakespeare. Provocative questions initiative - seeking mysteries and paradoxes that the questions for which there were no answers were the ones worth asking.

· “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom" by Francis Bacon

·“The Future of Leaders lead by asking”by Peter Drucker

In summary, how to ask the good questions is the art, the science, the philosophy, and the management discipline, Though we may need have the sensitivity about the cultural difference, the criteria of great questions should not have border, just like the true art and science are timeless and without boundary. Through effective questioning, hopefully we can re-imaging the life potential and re-unite the humanity.

Last week, Apple lost its iconic co-founder, and the world lost one of the great innovators, Steve Jobs, but we can keep carrying on his legacy and mantra:

Keep Simple, Keep focus, Stay Hungary and Stay Foolish!

From one of the HBR’s research articles, innovative entrepreneurs have something called creative intelligence, which enables discovery yet differs from other types of intelligence, and leverage the five discovery skills (association, questioning, observation, experimenting and networking), to create new ideas. The same sets of attributes may also be instilled into modern enterprise’s innovation DNA:

Process Innovation: Association

"That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." –Steve Jobs

Modern enterprises are over complex, the silo functions like the invisible walls, stop innovation flowing, also set the limit for talent growing, in addition, data, as 80% of corporate asset in digital era, has been set up the boundary to lose the insight.

The agile organization will connect all those dots through association, associate all related data to capture insight and foresight as well; associate business processes with enterprise architecture, business strategy, and decision management; associate talent with growing opportunities, the organization’s vision and incentive appreciation.

Culture Innovation: Questioning

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.Steve Jobs

Culture is the most intangible, but the most powerful fabric surrounding organization and our society as well, the hierarchical organization operates through command and control.

The modern enterprises need instill the innovative culture by questioning--encouraging to ask the questions, the art of questions is to find the alternative solutions, connect the dots, discover the blind spots, and challenge the status quo; The science of questions is about critical thinking, exploring the logic scenario and problem solving with scientific methodology.

Service Innovation: Observation

When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty, because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. –Steve Jobs

Today’s business become hyper competitive, also hyper complex, on the other hand, the world is inter-connected and inter-dependent than ever, the progressive enterprise need learn and grow through observation; by observation, you recognize the pattern, by observation, you connect the things; by observation, you associate the best services cross the industrial or geographic boundary.

The purpose of service innovation is to delight customers, by observing customers behavior and analyzing customers’ data, the business capture the insight to improve the service; by observing employee’s work habit, the business can proactively optimize business process and inspire staff to take extra miles; by observing industry trend, the business can adjust the strategy and priority to not only function well today, but also well prepare for the future.

Leadership Innovation : Experimenting

Don’t be trapped by Dogma. –Steve Jobs

20th century’s stereotyped leadership is not sufficient to face the rapidly changing global environment and digital era, the soft discipline like leadership also need be reshaped through hard science, experimenting, prototyping and calculating.

Leadership experimenting also means seeing the world through different angles, empowering the talent to break through all sorts of ceilings (to name a few, such as glass ceilings, bamboo ceilings, cement ceilings., etc), inspiring the fresh thinking and bold actions. Leadership experimenting can become the strategic step to revitalize the legacy businesses or industries.

Structure Innovation: Networking

Creativity is about connecting the things --Steve Jobs

The pyramidal structured organization brings up certain level of efficiency, the emerging social enterprise is to embrace the higher level of networking, not only promote the open leadership, engage employees communication, but also bring up customers and partners into conversation and participation.

Modern social/mobile/analytics technologies amplify the value through these business oriented networking, innovation get sparked continuously, collective wisdoms help organization make insightful decision and also take calculated risks.

Networked organization is more resilient and intelligent, to reimagine and reinvent growth with innovation DNA.

A leader is a dealer in hope." — Napoleon Bonaparte

In today’s hyper-competitive, rapidly changing digitized global environment, the average Fortune 500 company last only fifteen years, economic turmoil and Great Recession make the last decade “lost decade” for many organizations and industries, innovation is the only secret source to revive and re-energize troubled businesses, leadership innovation is the key ingredient and first step first to embrace the changes.

20th century’s stereotyped leadership style is neither sufficient nor complete, what is the leadership in 21st century, here are some new characteristics of modern leadership:

1. See the world of color, instead of black and white

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.John Quincy Adams

Many 20th century managers see the world with black & white vision via the mono-color lens, see the business either as partner or competitor, see the person either friend or enemy; well, multi-polar world in 21st century is the world full of color, also blur the lines from the view of multiple angles. The creative, synthesized words such as :

-Co-petition

-Simplex

-Globility

Well conceive the paradoxical reality today, and modern leadership also need reflect the theme, to embrace, engage and inspire the more authentic leadership with color.

2. More like Educators than Entertainer

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.-Ralph Nader

On the other hand, entertainer may have more fans and followers, with different set of skills, mostly entertainers don’t need always be self, the scripture is not always her or his own thought, the action may not always have the positive impact for our society.

3.Act as Bridge, than the Wall

"Strength lies in differences, not in similarities" Stephen R. Covey

Though the wall looks strong, and visible, it divides silos at our organization and our society; on the other hand, bridge is more transparent and classic, shorten the physical distance, even becomes landmark for our communities.

Leadership is like bridge, visible, but not too overwhelming, solid with style, to connect the world with elegance.

4. Half Water, Half Flame

Firing up leadership mix humanity with humility, lead with passion, sincerity, vision and mission

Water flowing leadership is on behalf of the flowing wisdom, the insightful observation, the analytic prediction, and knowledge accumulating.

5. Influencer, than AuthorityLeaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them." — John Maxwell

20th century’s leadership with authority lead through command and control at hierarchical pyramid like organization, modern digital technology shape natural leaders via multi-dimensional influence, to voice through broader base of audience and make influence on any interesting subject more seamlessly

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe' a part limited in time and space….Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." ---Albert Einstein

Built to Last, Good to Great is every organization’s dream journey, however, the global economic uncertainty, digital information explosion, and unprecedented social and environmental changes make business facing the significant challenges everyday, IT on the other hand, no longer afford to be built to maintain as a cost center, IT need be built to change as the value center, key differentiator to help reshape organizational competency, re-energize modern leadership and workforce, rekindle innovation and re-imagine growth.

IT’s new vision and mission is transformation, IT need be built to change for transforming organization into:

1.Elastic Enterprise via Cloud Computing

The industrial-based enterprise of 20th century had run out of gas, the digital enterprise of 21st century has the new characteristics and DNA of innovation. The elastic enterprise will promptly adapt to changes, ride up the new digital tide, not only surviving the economic recession, but also thriving and expanding effortlessly into the adjacent business, and explore the global landscape.

The elastic enterprise brings back IT as the strategic asset, the value creator, and modern IT solution such as cloud is timely and strategic, because it provides unprecedented flexibility in deploying applications, because it has a huge potential for reducing costs, because it is elastic to adjust capacity with more reasonable OPEX, easy to provisioning, faster to the marketing, and CIOs are increasingly becoming solution brokers or service orchestrators.

2.Real Time Enterprise via Mobile Computing

The modern enterprise need be non-stop, instant-on, IT consumerization is the catalyst to fuel today’s fast speed, to boost employees’ productivity, to reduce the cost and to leapfrog the competitors, and provide unique customer values.

The real time enterprise get “wired” without wire, the modern mobile computing such as smart phone, tablet., etc offers both organizations and employees alternative to access working related information with their fingertip remotely,

The foresighted IT organization will build up the effective enterprise mobility platform both for today’s efficiency and tomorrow’s growth, deploy the mobile application to create the new revenue stream, attract new talents such as next generation of digital native workforce, leverage the security and pursue operational excellence.

3.Networked Enterprise via Social Computing

The emergence of social computing challenges us to re-imagine the way we are working, learning and connecting, and by intelligently embracing the social computing, the modern organization extend its boundary, to inspire and inform customers and business partners to participate the conversation, and engage employees’ wisdom and insight.

IT plays critical roles to orchestrate the enterprise based social platform, collect big data and analyze it, to hear customer’s voice, foresee the business and technology trend, cultivate the innovative change management culture and unleash humanistic energy.

4.Agile Enterprise via Agile Methodology

Today’s digitized and decentralized global economic environment not only proves Change is the only constant” even more true than ever, but also the speed of change has been accelerated exponentially, agile imperative is strategic priority for every progressive, forward-looking organization in the new decade of 21stcentury.

Agile software development methodology, agile process management are the hard disciplines for organizations to adapt to the changes via iterative communication with customers, timeline-based project principles, more compatible with fast-paced, hyper-competitive environment; agile corporate structure, open leadership and learning culture are the soft disciplines to soil the innovation seeds. Being agile is strategic imperative for any modern enterprise regardless of its size. http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2011/08/agile-wings.html

5.Intelligent Enterprise via Analytics

The exponential grown of data (both structured and unstructured data) in digital era brings both significant opportunities and risks for contemporary enterprise. Analytics, as one of the most critical components of business capability becomes another strategic priority for business to gain competitive edge and distinctive capability in 21stcentury

The data is foundation of creating the insight, the insight perceive the new business opportunities and risks, however, the organizational modern data environment is fraught with inconsistency, redundancy, and multiple data and knowledge platforms, the modern IT need more integrated data life cycle management solutions to conquer data challenges, to provide data accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability.

In fact, top-performing organizations use analytics five times more than lower performers, and more than twice as many top performers indicated they use analytics to guide future strategies and day-to-day operations, as compared to low performers, CIO need create the strategic analytics roadmap in order to build up the intelligent enterprise, one of the most purposeful components in smarter planet and human society. http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2011/09/cios-analytics-roadm.html

6.Sustainable Enterprise via Green Computing

Sustainability is not just the buzzword about corporate social responsibility, green is the new gold and means the bottom line profitability in downturn economy.

Sustainability is about minimizing usage of non-renewable resources, optimizing resource use, cutting emission and recycling waste, the major role of IT is in the orchestration and delivery of the effective process, manage the capabilities and capacities of potential suppliers and mange the relationship with both partners and customers

Green computing such as virtulization, cloud computing, sustainable desktop strategies, green supply chain and smart meter & smart grid technology will bring up significant impact for IT to become the true game changer and value builder from sustainability perspective.

7.Customer-Centric Enterprise via all above Characteristics

The new characteristics listed above will become the new pillars to support the customer-centric enterprise, how to delight customers is essential for any organizations intent to build to last, and to be great by those strategic choices

Modern IT built to change, interwoven seamlessly with business, to become true innovation engine, strategy enabler, and modern capital society also transform itself from capital driven into customer-driven, to embrace the constantly change and deliver the shared social value for business, community, and humanity.